See the story with this photo at gizmodo.com
One of the articles making rounds in the No Nukes community today is this story about a wolf fish with three eyes caught near a nuclear power plant in the Cordoba province of Argentina.
The nuclear power station (Central Nuclear Embalse) on the southern shore of Embalse Rio Tercero near Embalse, Cordoba, Argentina [Source: Google Earth, image date 3/13/11, eye altitude 9,461 feet]
Central Nuclear Embalse is one of two nuclear power stations in operation in Argentina. Embalse is a Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor fueled by natural uranium and using heavy water for cooling. Embalse also produces cobalt-60, a radioisotope used in medicine and industry.
Embalse made news in August of 2011 when contracts were signed between the Argentine government, state-run utility Nucleoelectrica Argentina and Candu Energy to overhaul and expand the plant.
And the fish? Hoplias marabaricus -- the wolf fish -- ranges from Central America down through Argentina and usually lives near the edges of black and white water streams or pools, or on flooded forest floors. Young wolf fish sometimes become stranded in these flood pools and have to wait for the next floods to move back into stream channels.
In Brazil, researchers have studied this species as a potential stock fish for artisanal fishermen who have been dislocated from traditional river fishing areas by construction of dams for hydroelectric power generation. The wolf fish is also a species known to aquarists and sport fishermen.
Wolf Fish (Hoplias malabaricus) [Photo credit: Cláudio D. Timm]
Impacts to fish and wildlife living near nuclear plants or exposed to radionuclides is not a new area of concern. The Fukushima disaster last spring inspired a new round of articles on exposure of marine life, and consequences of legacy nuclear waste disposal on salmon near the Hanford facility in Washington have been studied. The damage to wildlife from water intake systems at nuclear plants led the Environmental Protection Agency to propose new rules this year to reduce the number of fish killed by these cooling systems.
Finding scientific information on "fish mutations near nuclear plants" was a bad search parameter on Google today, unless you wanted to read more about Blinky and the 3-eyed fish of of Embalse.
I found the original article about this catch to be interesting, in case you want to read about it in Spanish: El pez de tres ojos de los Simpson era argentino.
Comments